Traditionally, pizza shells have been formed by kneading and pressing a ball of proofed dough by hand into a relatively thin shell. Efforts to so prepare pizza shells entirely by machinery have not been successfull in that rollers, pressers and the like do not simulate the manipulations of the human fingers and, instead, squeeze and flatten the dough to an uninteresting thin but solid sheet without gas pockets, which might otherwise expand and rise in the oven to a light, relatively fluffy consistency. A hand operated roller designed to simulate hand kneading of a pizza shell has been disclosed in Weinkle U.S. Pat. No. 4,815,859 for "Roller for Making Pizza Shell", but that roller disclosed is hand operated and has to be rolled back and forth a number of times in order to work the dough completely.
In my previous U.S. Pat. No. 4,696,823, dated Sept. 29, 1987, I described a machine with clusters of balls to be rolled over pizza dough balls. However, the rollers there described are limited as to the size of dough ball it can handle; they are difficult to manufacture; and the system there described for applying olive oil or the like to the dough has not tested satisfactorily.